We explore responses of Australian school principals to the introduction of test score reporting via the My School website in 2010. Our analysis is motivated by the implicit assumption that heightened public scrutiny should motivate principals to align schools' policies and practices with what...

We examine the effect of participation in 4-H, the largest youth development program in the United States, on standardized test scores. We do this by utilizing grade-level longitudinal data on Florida's school districts from the Florida Department of Education combined with 4-H participation...

In this study we conduct a quasi-experimental analysis comparing students who enrolled in Early Award Scholarship Program (EASP) (formerly Promise Scholars) at any time during the 2016-17 or 2017-18 school year with their counterparts who did not enroll in the program during this time. We...

We study same-sex role model effects of teachers with a meta-analysis and our own study of three million students in 90 countries. Both approaches show that role model effects on performance are, on average, small: 0.030 SD in the meta-analysis and 0.015 SD in our multi-country study. Going...

The idea that students benefit from same-sex teachers has motivated policies around the world aimed at reducing gender inequalities. However, we do not know the size or generalizability of such same-sex teacher effects. We fill this gap by conducting a meta-analysis and our own study using data...

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the effect of early school entry on educational outcomes using standardized test score data on Italian pupils. The empirical procedure is designed to disentangle the effect of regular entry (Gift of Time) from possible unobserved confounding...

A number of high schools across the United States have moved to later bell times on the belief that their previous bell times were too early for the “biological clocks” of adolescents. In this article I study whether doing so improves academic performance. I first focus on the Twin Cities...

At the private university we analyze, the gap between white and black grade point averages falls by half between the students' freshmen and senior year. This outcome could suggest that affirmative action policies are playing a key role to reduce racial differences. However, this convergence...

This paper analyzes professors' effect from a fundamental first-year course in Economics on students' later performance in follow-on courses with a special attention given to the problem of self-selection bias of students toward certain professors. Based on an extensive dataset consisting of...